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Audio Video Standard, or AVS, is a compression codec for digital audio and
video, and a possible alternative to H.264/AAC/Vorbis, meant to potentially
replace MPEG-2. Chinese companies own 90% of AVS patents. The audio and video
files have an .avs extension as a container format, and the designers claim that
it will have twice the efficiency of MPEG2.
Overview
Development of AVS was initiated by the government of the People's Republic of
China. Commercial success of the AVS standard would not only reduce China's
royalty/licensing payments to foreign companies, it would presumably earn
China's electronics industry recognition among the more established industries
of the developed world, where China is still seen as an outlet for mass
production with limited indigenous design capability.
In January 2005, the AVS workgroup submitted their draft report to the
Information Industry Department (IID). On March 30, 2005, the first trial by the
IID approved the video portion of the draft standard for a public showing time.
The dominant audio/video compression codecs, MPEG and VCEG, enjoy widespread use
in consumer digital media devices, such as DVD players. Their usage requires
Chinese manufacturers to pay substantial royalty fees to the mostly-foreign
companies that hold patents on technology in those standards. For example, as of
2006, licenses ranging from $2.50 to $4 already make up about ten percent of the
cost for a contract-manufactured DVD player unit.
According to the state-run media, a key consideration of AVS was to reduce
foreign dependence on core intellectual properties used in digital media
technology. Proposed as a national standard in 2004, AVS had a targeted royalty
of 1 RMB (or about $0.10 USD) per player. On 30th April, 2005, AVS standard
video officially passed the public show and became the national standard.
AVS is currently expected to be approved for the Chinese high-definition
successor to the Enhanced Versatile Disc.
Open source implementations of an AVS video decoder can be found in the OpenAVS
project and within the libavcodec library. The latter is integrated in some free
video players like MPlayer, VLC or xine. xAVS is also an open source AVS encoder
with a working decoder.
In September 2007 DVD-forum appointed a new standard for High definition media
expressly meant for the Chinese market, the so-called CH-DVD. As the name
suggests, this standard follows in the steps of HD-DVD, being in fact fully
compatible, but also adding official support for AVS besides Mpeg4/AVC and VC-1
codec: therefore CH-DVD readers will be able to read HD-DVD discs, but HD-DVD
readers may not do the same because they don't have support for AVS codec.
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